Free Facing the Wave by Gretel Ehrlich Page A

as he talks. “We worked on radiation issues in Kamchatka, at the bombing sites. It’s one of our strengths.”
    Many of the local fishermen in the Fukushima area now welcome the Greenpeace campaigners—the very people they’ve been fighting in southern whaling waters. “They need to know how contaminated the water is, and we help them find out,” Wakao-san says. Fishermen are donating samples of seaweed, sea cucumber, oysters, mussels, anchovies, and a variety of fish to Greenpeace, which, in turn, sends the samples to certified nuclear labs in France and Belgium to be analyzed. So far, Wakao-san tells me, fourteen of the twenty-one samples recently sent are over the limit for cesium isotopes and high concentrations of iodine, which indicates liquid discharges from the reactors.
    “We need clear guidelines from the government both for thefishermen and for the consumers. So they know what they’re eating and where it came from,” Wakao-san says. “We need to study the whole marine ecosystem, the food chain of the fish, the water itself, and the mud and sand at the bottom, because that’s where radiation sits.”
    The entire fishery from thirty to sixty kilometers south of the Fukushima power plant is highly contaminated, including seaweed and oysters. Bottom-feeding fish such as rockfish, flounder, and greenlings have been found to be five thousand times more toxic than they were before the tsunami.
    Every morning at dawn, Wakao-san goes to the Tokyo fish market to test for radiation. “They’re getting used to seeing me there. When the government tests, they wave a dosimeter over the top of the fish as they come off the boats, but that doesn’t work. You have to cut the fish open. I’m getting very good at handling the knife,” he says, laughing.
    Wakao-san looks for the bright side of the disaster, and sees it as an opportunity for Japanese citizens to become activists. “We must use this chance to raise our voices because the Japanese government no longer ensures our future. For Japanese people the ocean is a factory for seafood. Fish is mostly what we eat. My parents, who are older, think they don’t have to be careful, so they eat the
most
contaminated fish in hopes that the less contaminated fish will be there for younger people.”
    When I ask Wakao-san, who has two young children, if he’s still eating fish, he smiles, and says: “I’m Japanese. Maybe not as much, but yes.”

Mushiatsui
    Morning. Fickle June weather: cloudy, windy, rainy, misty, but mostly hot and humid
—mushiatsui
. In old Japan, weather watchers invoked rainfall by cutting off the head of a swan and throwing it behind a waterfall. In the town of Kuji, near the northern extent of tsunami damage, a swan that lost a wing has been rescued and given a home.
    I pick through a pack of Hana Fuda cards, a simple Japanese card game printed on mulberry paper, based on the seasons, and try to see how people here hinge themselves to the natural world: caring for miniaturized alpine rock gardens, growing flowers, living in the play of light and shadow through paper doors.
    Pine bough, flower, insect, bird,
o-sake
, and
o-mizu
are the shuffled emblems of seasonal shifts and transience, of luck, life, plentitude, and perishability. June’s card features “Peony (for beauty and medicine) with Butterfly (for transience and change).”
    We take a torturous coast road that is tree-shrouded and buckled when it exists at all. The ocean view is intermittent because of the trees. The scenes below, when we can see them, resemble a painting by Hieronymus Bosch: you can count the dead and missing; you can see how a hill functioned as a knife slicing oncoming water; you can step through what’s left after the Wave. In one place, a Mitsubishi F-2 fighter jet banged into a damaged building. The steel ribs of a fish factory are bent over shredded rubble that resembles combed hair. Nikki gets a Tweetabout the Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, who donated